How bad was goats

I’ve only really had 1 single goats game where it was one sweaty goats team against another(and no I played dps not tank or support and yes I got flamed by this 29 yo man child). This was when open q first came out again like 6-9 months ago.

I wanted to know how bad was it, what other hero’s could you actually play not just symetra teleporter from spawn, and how hard was it to counter brigs armor-lucio speed amp. To my knowledge this meta went on for almost about 1 and a half to 2 years until double shields became meta when they added sigma

I’m pretty sure sym had shield generator back then, not for the entirety of goats but at least half of it

As for how bad it was
Let’s just say ez win if the other team didn’t run goats, and DPS were unviable

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We’re there any actual counter comps. I feel like sombras hack could be big in that meta

Pretty sure hackfist countered it well at a contenders level.

The GOATS composition (Reinhardt, Zarya, D.Va, Brigitte, Lucio, Ana) were extremely resilient compositions that could almost indefinitely prevent any other team composition from being able to get a first pick on them. When played properly (in a deathball like formation working to contest the objective or force the other team out of position), the six players could effectively just bully their way around the playfield. Team fights were extremely slow during the “neutral” (the Phase of the team fight before ultimates are used) and the goal was purely to focus on building your team’s ultimate economy. It then became simply a matter of using ultimates effectively to maintain control over an objective.

TL:DR… slow team fights, press Q to win, “WhY dID tH3y DELete all the DPS!?”

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It was basically just in OWL and MAYBE 6-stacks in high GM/top 500

it was non-existent for the majority of the playerbase.

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It wasn’t that bad or even that prevalent. People really blow it out of proportion.

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Your missing the part where D.Va would be swapped out because she wasn’t really the MAIN part of Goats.

Yet, she still got nerfed the hardest.

#RevertMatrixRange

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It was so fun to play in GM. You can just roll into the enemy team and live, and felt like the golden era for tank players. 6 man shatters and gravs, 4k dva bombs, making huge blocks against sound barrier or shatter, and snipers werent meta

But lasted too long

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Basically, take any Rein/Zarya deathball you’ve seen in low ranks and quickplay and multiply it’s efficiency and boring factors by 100.

Goats itself, when played with the proper coordination to utilize it, is probably one of the most robust and overall strongest comps overwatch has ever seen.

The catch however was it did require good coordination to use at that kind of level- many aspects of it relied on long cooldown shot duration abilities from multiple heroes to bolster a teams defenses to the level that they were amazingly difficult to kill without play-opening ults.

Outside of practiced coordination it was very easy for these multiple heroes to overlap their abilities- and drastically reduce their effectiveness.

Bubbling someone who had decaying stacked armor, using DM on a target as they got bubbled, etc

There were a lot of things to go “wrong” and diminish the power.

Even at Gm you didn’t see goats every game, let alone see it played well (were GM party size limitations a factor at the time? Can’t recall when all that changed)

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Exactly this, the hate it got was very much from overstaying it’s welcome.

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Grandmaster games began to restrict grouping up to no more than 2 starting in season 16:

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It was definitely played in other ranks, it just wasn’t super popular cause people like their dps heroes too much. Though if one team went goats and one didn’t, the goats team had a pretty big advantage as long as they could play it decently. Goats actually took a considerable amount of coordination, which is why some people really liked it, but it was incredibly boring to watch.

I honestly don’t remember this. People would just play Pharah/Mercy and hardcounter it since ladder teams couldn’t deal with it.

Reaper also kinda walked over it on ladder.

Regardless of even that, 3-0-3 comps had a sub 50% winrate (omnicmeta used to show stats for different team comps), and below masters I remember it used to sit at like 42% regularly.

nah, she got her rework pushed to live in june of 2018, Hanzo’s rework was may of 2018, we were most likely in the middle of the double sniper meta still, GOATs did come in to play around this time but didnt see wide meta usage until after a little while since players had to get used to the comp and learning to run it before they made the hard switch to it

There were counter comps but blizz kept nerfing the counters. There were comps involving pharah, junkrat, cree, doomfist, or sombra that could counter it until blizz nerfed them.

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Probably rank dependent. I played in diamond back then, occasionally dropping to plat.

No. This never happened. Brig provided massive armor back then and reaper is one of the worst dps vs armor.

It was wasn’t quite non-existent in GM, but it wasn’t hard-meta either - they were playing a combination of GOATS and Orisa/Hog+Double-sniper throughout all of 2019 up until the release of Role Queue. At the start of 2019, all Tank pickrates were roughly equal in GM - probably the best Tank balance has ever been.

GOATS fell more-and-more out-of-favour and Orisa+Hog solidified as meta as Blizzard kept introducing nerfs aimed at GOATS heroes, targeted mainly at OWL-level.

tl;dr: GOATS wasn’t all that bad on ladder, was hard-meta in OWL. In trying to nerf the OWL meta, they forced a new meta on ladder.

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Goats was a fun to play meta for most tank and support players, while DPS players were moaning in pain.

Painful to watch for me, but it was kinda fun to play it.

Some pro players and streamers said, Goats was the best meta in case of strategical ability and Ultimate usage.

My thought: There is a vid out from an OWL match where both teams have thrown 12 Ultimates at each other and no-one died. I would say its broken and thank god such Support / Tank stacking is gone outside of Arcade / OQ matches.